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Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

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Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#181

Post by alexkavon »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #97
alexkavon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Their docs inspire little hope that the protocol will be little more than niche. How to build on top of this protocol without requiring someone with domain specific knowledge is beyond what's offered. Cue XKCD protocols comic.

Matrix is gaining adoption throughout the open source world super quickly. There are screenshots, guides, and links to join all over the place. Given that, I'm really impressed that anyone looks at Matrix and thinks of it as "little more than niche".

Just clarify since I've upset some members of its community. I'm speaking from a development perspective. Sure Riot might have a large amount of users online, but what portion of that is people developing on top of the protocol. As I originally stated the docs are less than stellar, considering there are many missing pieces. So other than the original dedicated developers building a few things for a large community, it would appear that on the development side that it is very difficult to get started. As in: I have to seek out someone with specific domain knowledge and ask hundreds of questions and take lots of notes in order to extend and use the matrix protocol properly. Which makes something designed to be open, little more than niche.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#182

Post by xf86alsa »

diegoperini wrote: post #148
xf86alsa wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the community members has a bot that travels from room to room anytime somebody mentions a room link. The list (and graph!) of all indexed rooms is here: https://t2bot.io/voyager/

That graph burned downed my house (Macbook Air). :)

The bot gets around!

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#183

Post by ATsch »

marknadal wrote: post #82

Congrats Matrix team! That is huge. Competitor here, few questions: - You guys are currently implementing federated protocols, right? We do P2P protocols, I'm curious why you guys chose federated - why do you think it is better? - How are you guys different than Signal? Obviously way different than Telegram, as it isn't even Open Source (thanks for Open Sourcing your work!). - When I was working on our E2EE private m…

> why federated, not decentralized?

afaict, Matrix is both, kind of. Rooms are decentralized, while users are federated.

> What about signal?

Signal is great, but it solves a very different problem. It's a good replacement for talking to your best friends on your phone.

But it fails quickly once you go past that. No true multi-device, no talking without releasing your phone number, no public groups. No mentions, no permalinks. In that regard, I'd say matrix is closer to telegram and irc than WhatsApp or Signal

> what about metadata?

The state of metadata in E2E is... not good. Really, only the content of the message is secret. There are a number of ideas how to deal with this.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#185

Post by Arathorn »

geezerjay wrote: post #161
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is gaining adoption throughout the open source world super quickly. There are screenshots, guides, and links to join all over the place. Given that, I'm really impressed that anyone looks at Matrix and thinks of it as "little more than niche".

> There are screenshots, guides, and links to join all over the place. Given that matrix describes itself as an open standard, neither of those aspects says much about the project other that there's either some goodwill or a PR department.

fwiw there's no PR or marketing department, unless you count me trying to field questions.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#186

Post by dontchooseanick »

hoschicz wrote: post #23
aw3c2 wrote: post #2

Will this make end-to-end encryption finally get the polish it needs?

Do you feel like WhatsApp is not polished?

Do you feel like WhatsApp is open-source and can be found on f-droid ?

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#187

Post by jdp23 »

Arathorn wrote: post #178
egeozcan wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is a great choice for implementing a network protocol but most of the time, rewriting is not a great choice (source needed). Do you have any public discussions or blog posts about this decision?

So totally agreed that rewrites are almost always not a good idea, as per the famous "Things you should never do!" Joel Spolsky post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... ). The difference for a project like Matrix however is that our product is not really any single software codebase but the protocol spec itself. In fact, it's a bad smell about the spec if it's too hard to implement it -…

Great answer. It sounds like this was very much the right call for Matrix.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#188

Post by lub »

acct1771 wrote: post #138
Arathorn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(oh, and we rewrote (almost) the whole thing in Go, too)

I saw someone bitching elsewhere about Python 2.7, but have yet to see any other semi-relevant complaints yet, so congrats to the team on that! Any comment on that?

There is progress on Python 3 support:

> Preparation for py3 (PR #3061, #3073, #3074, #3075, #3103, #3104, #3106, #3107, #3109, #3110) Thanks to @NotAFile!

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.28.0

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#189

Post by erlend_sh »

Arathorn wrote: post #178
egeozcan wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is a great choice for implementing a network protocol but most of the time, rewriting is not a great choice (source needed). Do you have any public discussions or blog posts about this decision?

So totally agreed that rewrites are almost always not a good idea, as per the famous "Things you should never do!" Joel Spolsky post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... ). The difference for a project like Matrix however is that our product is not really any single software codebase but the protocol spec itself. In fact, it's a bad smell about the spec if it's too hard to implement it -…

Are those Dendrite core developers that had to leave coming back now that you have secured funding?

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#190

Post by Arathorn »

erlend_sh wrote: post #189
Arathorn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So totally agreed that rewrites are almost always not a good idea, as per the famous "Things you should never do!" Joel Spolsky post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... ). The difference for a project like Matrix however is that our product is not really any single software codebase but the protocol spec itself. In fact, it's a bad smell about the spec if it's too hard to implement it -…

Are those Dendrite core developers that had to leave coming back now that you have secured funding?

Unlikely, sadly, having got jobs elsewhere before we secured long-term funding. However, it’s not like Dendrite is ownerless - we’ve made good progress on it since they left up until the point we had to temporarily double down on Synapse. Meanwhile, folks from the community who have been hacking on Dendrite are coming on board in the next few weeks. And the old devs are also still around in a FOSS contributor capacity; answering pings via Github and Matrix where needed.

https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/graphs/contributors paints a fairly clear picture of where things have got to (with Synapse temporarily taking priority since Jan).

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